Data centers are generally centralized facilities that provide Internet and intranet services supporting businesses and organizations. A typical data center can house various types of electronic equipment, such as computers, servers (e.g., email servers, proxy servers, and DNS servers), network switches, routers, data storage devices, and other associated components. A given data center can have hundreds or thousands of interconnected server nodes communicating with each other and external devices via a switching architecture comprising the switches and routers. Conventional data centers can also be configured for virtualization, permitting the server nodes to share network interface cards (NICs), hard disk drives, or other hardware. In doing so, a complex switch fabric is required for facilitating communications between nodes via the data center architecture.